All hail luxury

19º 30' N, 42º 36' W, Atlantic Ocean -- To stand on the top deck in the shadowed life of cat-black midnight is to escape the 148,528 tons below: the champagne and aged cheese, the cutlery engraved "Gainsborough, England," the staircases covered in leopard-print carpet, the walls hung with swirling acrylic paintings entitled "The Theatre" and "The Circus."

Because the temptation, of course, is to indulge, to dive into this city of some 2,600 vacationers and the 1,200 more who serve them, to roam from lecture hall to the world's first shipboard planetarium, from plush theater seat to straight-backed barstool, to linger amid conversations about Saudi royal family weddings or about the fact that "Pomp and Circumstance" is not known to the British by that name.

This temptation begins before the Queen Mary 2 leaves its Southampton dock, as if it is a voucher for the months of publicity in glossy magazines and during network broadcasts heralding the two-week maiden voyage of this, the world's largest passenger ship, the first trans-Atlantic liner built in more than three decades, a marriage of corporate branding, modern technology, and good old-fashioned nostalgia.

A man from Brazil stands on deck seven, the promenade deck, before the orchestra on the dock strikes a tune, or the fireworks charge from the barge below, or the ship's whistle sounds its staggering goodbye, and says, "I've been on 91 cruises."

"Not so many for me," says his wife. "Only 58."

It happens so quickly, this world of insiders and newcomers conspiring a daily schedule of pursuits and leisures. The padded lounge chairs will line deck seven throughout the sun-stretched day. The techniques of watercolor will be the subject of a class at 10 a.m. A Marc Chagall goes for auction at 11. Midafternoon, there will be a discussion of the grner veltliner grape. Then, of course, the black-tie dinners and Dame Shirley Bassey, or the Ascot Ball, or the one-armed bandits that dance all hours in the casino.

One begins to feel as though this is the only point, as if it is all.

But not on the top deck, where wind dulls the hum of diesel engines churning beneath the star-specked, boundless sky, moving this ship, black-hulled and red-stacked, toward Barbados. On a fall day three years ago, another craft, a 23-foot plywood rowboat, set on the same course, from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean. That crossing took not four days, but 58, layered with sea spray and sores from the oars and the sheepskin-padded seats. Meals came with names like Ramen and Pringles and sleep in four-hour shifts.

Of the memories that linger with Tom Mailhot of Ipswich, one of a two-man crew that made that crossing, many are notable for their intimacy: the smell of flying fish jumping upwind; the sounds of waves hitting the hull; the cloak of 100-degree heat pushing doldrums upon the sea; voices.The voices came about a dozen times, Mailhot says, visiting more often during the approach to Barbados. Each sound, of a man, or a woman, rose alone. It formed words, almost, but spoke no clear language, told no story.

"I am not one to hallucinate, or get delirious, even in the heat," Mailhot recalled recently during a conversation outside his home in Ipswich. "We were right on the slave route. We were rowing right over them, their shackles were still beneath us. They'd disposed of bodies all the way across. And I just thought it was these souls coming up from beneath us. Tortured souls."

As Richard Woodman, author of "The History of the Ship" and a veteran captain, contended in the introduction:"For the history of the ship belongs to the era of our struggle to dominate the world about us, and has become, for better or worse, a tool with which we have shaped our civilisation."

The newest, grandest ship, the Queen Mary 2, is our offering, a kind of seaborne civilization of consumption, ordered by an American owner, built on French land, sailing under the British flag steadily through the Atlantic night toward idleness in Barbados, then St. Thomas, and finally Fort Lauderdale, Fla. History churns in the wake, today surges against the bow, as if to ask, why are you here?

On the first night, after only an hour or two at sea, a middle-aged couple steps aboard one of 28 elevators that rise as many as 12 decks and the woman announces, flatly, "It's a bit too big for our taste."

It is odd to hear this, because this ship has been touted as nothing if not big, the grandest in a lineage that started when Samuel Cunard ordered four steamships from the Clyde shipyards in 1839. The Queen Mary 2 marketing staff has turned the ship's sea-bound statistics into familiar terms: nearly as long, from bow to stern, as the Empire State building is tall. By volume, the QM2, as it is known, is more than twice the size of the Queen Elizabeth 2, the Cunard liner soon to end its storied runs between New York and Southampton, and more than three times as big as the Titanic.

But what makes this $800 million ship especially significant today, to nautical minds, is that it is an ocean liner, designed not to plod and dodge weather on a Caribbean circuit, as are other modern passenger ships, but to keep a steady pace, often 25 nautical miles per hour, while crossing Atlantic seas bad and good.

On a recent day during the QM2's crossing from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean, Stephen Payne, the ship's chief architect, takes a seat in the Commodore Club, which overlooks the bow from deck nine. Soon, a passing British couple, searching for their footing, stop."You've created the ambition of something I've wanted to do my whole life," says the woman, in a bold and awkward tone. She bows toward Payne.The man praises the ship's integrity.

"I particularly like her sea-keeping abilities," he says. "To keep that speed, in these seas, very impressive."The man is not talking about the scene beyond the bow, where gently rolling blue spits sparks of sunlight. No, he is referring to six days earlier, on the gray run south from England, across the Bay of Biscay, where the QM2, fully loaded, gets her first taste of rough weather. The seas swell to 35 feet, headwinds pound at 70 knots, and the ship motors on, holding to 26 knots per hour.

This means that many of those proud embarkers upon history, who arrived at Southampton in cotton trousers and sensible shoes and checked so many pieces of soft-sided luggage that departure came an hour late, awake to spend their first day at sea in their cabins. They speed-dial room service for ginger ale, or rush to the purser for Stugeron 15 tablets, or summon the ship's doctor to administer an injection of anti-seasickness brew. The crew, more than 30 percent of whom have never been to sea, perhaps fare the worst, as evidenced by a young Filipino waiter, staggering down narrow corridors while hoisting trays of pastrami sandwiches and cheeseburgers for the unafflicted.

Early on, though, the affliction comes in other forms. Some diners wait more than two hours to be served in Britannia, the two-story restaurant that hosts those sailing in all but the highest priced cabins. A young man, when asked how a passenger could get a book from behind a glass door in the posh library on deck eight, replies with a smile, "I'm really not sure, sir, it is my first day."

But such affronts are soothed by warming sun, smoothing seas, and admiration: fireworks and throngs of thousands in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, once a stop for Christopher Columbus, where on this day children and mothers and old men clamor to hug and kiss Queen Mary 2 passengers returning to the ship.

All hail luxury. A grand piano sits in a five-deck foyer. Stewards make beds by day and turn down sheets by night. Britannia service improves and passengers tuck into lamb and salmon and foie gras. Upstairs, in the grill rooms reserved for passengers paying more than $7,000 each, some as much as $37,499 each, lobster tail and caviar highlight the changing fare orchestrated by celebrity chef Daniel Boulud.

Word spreads about the crab cakes and pepper sauce on the tasting menu at Lotus, an Asian restaurant, or the excellence of Todd English, the self-titled offering by the Boston chef, in which green and black olive tapenades tease with texture.

By day, Oxford professors talk about myths of the Atlantic and the wealth of the Indies. British acting students banter through the words of Shakespeare to a circle of passengers beating the rhythm of iambic pentameter on their thighs. In late afternoon, 30 computers and six projectors broadcast imaginary constellations onto a planetarium screen deep within a ship so bright that it weakens the night sky.

At the Canyon Ranch Spa, complete with churning therapy pool and private rooms for grape seed scrubs and massages meant to push away the stress of shipboard life, a woman from the Gulf Coast of Florida sits in a reclining chair during a pedicure and closes her copy of "The Da Vinci Code.""A friend of mine is producing the movie, only he didn't tell me who is going to star in it," she says. "I think it's going to be Tom Hanks. Or Tom Cruise. No, Tom Hanks. That's it."

Upstairs, on the world's broadest ship bridge, two officers keep watch as computers steer the QM2 on its course for Barbados. When it arrives at port, the master will maneuver the ship with a thick, black joystick.

Downstairs again, at the bar in Todd English, a waiter tells a Japanese couple that he is from Galway."Galway," replies the man, trim and sharp in a dark sport coat. "I once bought a race horse from Galway."

The temptation returns, like a swell, to revel in this, to dip Parmesan crisp into the tapenade, and not so much as wonder where it all is heading.Ships visit. And a ship this fast, this driven by schedule and the demands of multinational business can quickly churn seas to move from country, continent, and hemisphere as though it all were a theme park. During this two-week voyage, the QM2 pushes past Europe, touches near the coast of Africa, drives toward South America. It moves from eastern hemisphere to west, from above the Tropic of Cancer to below it.

Thoughts cannot help but wander to places not so far from port, where children linger in thatched huts, weakening from malnutrition that no doubt could be avoided with, among other things, occasional bites of the lamb chop left tonight on the Wedgwood plate.

It is not that the divisions of the outside world do not appear on board. True, among passengers, the class distinctions of bygone days have diminished, save for the assigning of special restaurants for higher-priced fares, and one small sun deck, reserved for those in the Queen's Grill, the highest category of cabin. Otherwise, what is public for one is public for all.

The distinctions now fall between passengers, an international crowd, to be sure, but dominated by Americans and British, and a crew that speaks dozens of native languages. Of these, many are from the Philippines. While relatively cheap labor for Cunard, the deal cuts both ways. A steward mentions that he can earn in eight months aboard the QM2 what he would make in three years of work in Manila.

But it is not hard to note, when walking past those washing decks, to those cleaning rooms, to those welcoming diners and serving filet mignon, that the accents change, increasingly, from Asian to European, and within that, from Polish, to Irish, French, and English.

Cunard casts this all in a nobler light. The QM2 is a liner, and those who love the great ships hope that it will not suffer the fate of other modern cruise vessels, shuttling vacationers to good shopping in nearby ports of call. Commodore Ronald Warwick, the man who followed his father as master of the Queen Elizabeth 2 and now is the first to lead this ship to sea, hopes the QM2 can draw enough passengers to sail mostly on the Atlantic, between New York and Southampton, adding a sense of purpose to pleasure.

But times have changed. And in order to build this ship, in order to justify it, did Cunard or parent Carnival Corp. cut a deal with the shipyard devil -- offering eights decks of balconies and room for all the shipboard entertainment and diversions modern cruise passengers demand?Because now it must take those passengers where they want to go. In this maiden year, in addition to its 13 trans-Atlantic voyages, the QM2 must also wander among islands in the Caribbean and Mediterranean and hug the shorelines of South America, Scandinavia, and New England.On its own, the QM2 would be but a ship of dreams, offering passengers the renovated past while taking them to nice places. But as the biggest, most expensive of all pleasure ships on the sea, the Queen Mary 2 becomes the loudest champion of a particular philosophy: that the world is to be consumed by the relative well-to-do, sheltered in comfort.

In the words spoken by a silver-haired man from England as he enjoys a smoke in the ship's cigar lounge and ponders a trip aboard QM2 to Rio de Janeiro: "I've always wanted to go to South America. But it's just so dangerous."

After its arrival in Fort Lauderdale tomorrow, the Queen Mary 2 will rest for four days, basking in the glow of television cameras and ship buffs and the curious. Then, restocked, loaded with a new batch of passengers, it will sail off on a Caribbean cruise. All of it, the champagne bar sponsored by Veuve Clicquot, the smoky painting of Marilyn Monroe, the portrait autographed in the flowing script of the current monarch, becomes our legacy, our chapter in history: Here sails the Good Ship Indulgence, stopping to sample vistas and jewelry shops and spicy cooking.Then, experience consumed, passengers safely back on board, the Queen Mary 2 will sound its whistle into the falling night. But to call it a whistle misleads, because this is more a horn, an alarm, primal and profound. It will rattle doors and quicken the pulse of infants and carry over sea and land for 10 miles. Then the engines will growl as the QM2 sails into the boundless sea, and the whistle will bellow again, as if to say, it must be this way, it can only be this way. Full speed ahead.